APAC financial regulators and cloud providers recently conducted a first-of-its-kind crisis management exercise simulating a large-scale public cloud outage impacting the region’s financial sectors.
This was organised under the Financial Sector Cloud Resilience Forum, established by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in April 2023.
This forum, comprising representatives from Asia Pacific financial regulators and cloud service providers, convenes twice a year to discuss best practices for managing cloud risks in the financial sector.
This exercise comes at a time of heightened awareness surrounding the potential for widespread disruption from technology failures.
The exercise, held on 6 November 2024, allowed participants to test their incident response plans, explore potential regulatory interventions, and develop collaborative mitigation strategies.
By working through the simulated crisis, regulators and cloud providers gained valuable insights into improving situational awareness, coordinating responses, ensuring a swift recovery, and maintaining public trust in the financial system.
Attendees included senior representatives from central banks in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore, as well as major cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Vincent Loy, Assistant Managing Director (Technology), MAS, and Chairperson of the Forum, said,
“This inaugural exercise is timely as it helps to strengthen processes for responding to a major public cloud incident in the financial sector.
Through the exercise, both the financial authorities and CSPs [cloud service providers] have gained deeper insights on how to coordinate their efforts effectively in responding to and recovering from disruptions, and maintain public confidence in the financial sector”.
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik
